KembaWalker wrote:Harry Garris wrote:KembaWalker wrote:You can definitely say Caitlin Clark is underpaid while simultaneously saying WNBA players as a whole are not. They aren’t conflicting opinions. There’s no logic at all behind Caitlin specifically being worth seven figures to drink Gatorade for a couple commercials and being worth 5 figures to the league. She should get a commissioners exemption from collective bargaining because of the degree of an outlier she is. It’s way more than even LeBron or MJ
This shouldn't need to be said but there's a system for determining player's contracts in professional sports leagues and it's not intended to be some reflection of fair market value.
Yeah obviously, and these systems weren’t designed to handle one singular player coming in and being worth more to the league than every other player combined x10. It was stupid and not defensible when MJ was making 3 mil or a year or whatever and it’s even more ridiculous with Caitlin.
Standing behind collective bargaining is dumb pandering to bureaucracy. Caitlin didn’t get to collectively bargain anything, she’s coming into a system where she specifically and she alone is getting taken massive advantage of to a degree we haven’t seen in sports probably ever.
It’s a problem, just saying “well that’s just the way we do things, this shouldn’t have to be said” is a pretty lame place to stand but you do you
Does anyone truly know what she's actually going to be worth to the WNBA in their setting though? Should they pre-emptively make wild exemptions without actually knowing? Hype doesn't always result in sustained hype and success in different settings. Now I'm not saying she won't generate a lot, but you're asking them to go against the agreement they made with all their players for one player without truly knowing what she will actually bring in their setting.
The WNBA is not women's college basketball, we have to understand that it's not only Iowa who had been drawing crowds in NCAA women's basketball. Top NCAA women's basketball in general has been drawing crowds.
In terms of Caitlyn, her main source of income will be endorsements, the WNBA will primarily just be an avenue to allow her to get and maximize those endorsements. So you can't look at the value of playing in the league as just her contract because there is the opportunity value too. If she isn't playing professional basketball in the US and on tv, she won't be able to capitalize on endorsements, so she also understands that.
If she played for more money in Europe and had no US playing presence, she wouldn't be able to continue to generate the endorsement income.